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Sunday, 4 August 2013

I'm a Fire Starter

As I'm in the midst of getting 'Reasons to be Cheerful Part One' ready for print, I'm not able to dedicate quite as much time to blogging as I'd like to, and so I thought I'd share with you an excerpt from another book I'm working on. Part fact, part fiction, a bit of swearing and a lot about teenage girls who have the magical combination of the funds to buy alcohol and an off-licence owner who never ever asks for ID....

'The Great Tampon Fire'

I have never been sure whether our
parents were too distracted by their own grief to try to exert more authority
over what we got up to during the evenings, or if they truly did believe that
we were responsible young people in possession of basic survival skills and a
spare ten pence to phone home.Whichever it
was, we were frequently out most, or all, of the night and always nowhere near
where we had told our parents we were going to be.With friends who were now at college we had a
ready supply of invites to parties and people old enough, and willing, to buy
alcohol for us.This was a time of much
revelry, cheap cider, black leggings and moshing to Neds Atomic Dustbin.It was also a time of going out and not
thinking about how, or if, we were going to get home.And it was inevitable at some point that we
would end up roughing it, as Annette and me did after one such party in
Bramley.

Bramley was a short train ride from
Basingstoke and boasted five pubs for a village with less than five hundred people. Living in the countryside requires the constitution
to cope with extreme weather, extreme boredom and extremely high alcohol
consumption. This night would test us
for all three. We had told our parents we
were staying ‘at a friend’s’ and so arrived full of excitement and a sense of
being very clever at getting an all-night pass.
The venue was the village hall and we were in our finest indie kid
attire. I was attempting to rock Robert
Smith-style hair back-combed to within an inch of its life and Annette was pale
and angular, with eight-hole Doc Martins. I
was planning to save up and trump her by buying some ten-hole ones in Ox blood
red but until then had to make do with cheapo monkey boots from the army
surplus store.

By the time we arrived, the party was already well
underway, the room full of goths and shoe-gazers; Inspiral Carpets ‘Cool as
Fuck’ t-shirts alongside frayed cardigans.
But even teenagers, who hate everything, secretly like a disco light,
and so flashes of red, green and blue cut their way through the thick fug of
cigarette smoke. The parents, aware that
their presence would cause a huge dent in their son’s cool, had left us to it,
hoping that the evening would not result in them facing a huge bill for damages
or having to publish a public apology on the Parish Notice Board.

We walked in, our green plastic
bags each containing six cans of Special Brew (our tastes at that time were
dominated by strength rather than seeking out hints of gooseberry and citrus
aromas) and in our pockets a pack of twenty Consulate menthol cigarettes. Somehow smelling and tasting like a minty
ashtray was far chicer than smelling and tasting like a normal one. We sought out the birthday boy, offered our
congratulations and cracked open the first can.

We drank our way through our green
bags and then set about procuring some more alcohol using our minty charms. I acquired a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale
and Annette got a can of Tennents Super.
We knocked them back and headed to the dance floor to flail our arms to
‘Sit Down’ by James. Unfortunately for
me, the belly full of beer coupled with flailing and the fact that I was a fifteen year old girl, and not a six foot, sixteen stone man meant that I had definitely had
more than enough and it was with a sense of great panic that I realised that
there was a very real possibility that I was going to puke all over the person
next to me. Somehow I managed to career
through the room quickly enough for the arc of bile that left my mouth to reach
a toilet and not the dance floor. I was
at once relieved and then horrified. I
had thrown up blood, and lots of it. I
screamed for Annette but really didn’t need to as she had seen my swift exit
and followed me in.

On discovering that I wasn’t about
to die, I perked up, stuffed half a pack of Wrigleys in my mouth to disguise
the foul taste of Newky Pukey and went back to dance.

The rest of the evening was the
expected mix of drunkenness, crap fights and mums and dads arriving to collect
their teenagers; instantly making them look five in front of their friends. By the time it was all over it was half past
Midnight and it was then that we realised the following:

Everyone we knew
had gone home.

We had no way of
getting home.

It was a sobering thought.There was the option of calling Annette’s dad
to come and get us but as she put it “he’s told me if I cause him any more
aggro this week he’s going to throw me out” so we decided against risking his
wrath and instead bit the bullet, nicked some left overs and walked out into
the night.We decided to make our way to
the train station as we had figured that the mythical ‘Milk Train’ that we
believed travelled up and down the country delivering vats of the white stuff
to towns and cities before being put on milk floats would probably stop by in
the next few hours and drop us off in Basingstoke before the morning.

How wrong we were….

We got to the station and looked
around. It was a typical village station
– two small platforms with two benches, one locked waiting room and that was
that. We took a bench each and decided
to try to curl up and get some sleep. It
was there that we learned a simple equation:

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A blog by....

Part "thinking woman's Bridget Jones" according to one reviewer, part "edgy Pam Ayres" according to the Newbury Weekly News.

If you've ever fallen over at a wedding, marvelled at the ability of parents to clean up poo mid-meal then carry on eating, or found yourself straining at the leash to be free of corporate life, then my writing is for you.